Event results in 60 tons of used tires, 2,5000 gallons of oil

Bald, beaten, huge and tiny, the tires rolled in Tuesday to a special collection at the Lake County Fairgrounds in Grayslake.

From individuals with a few unwanted spares in the garage to heavy trucks brimming with tires from public works' garages throughout the area, the rubber booty covered a half acre or more as the end of the six-hour event neared.

Strong-backed volunteers, many of them college students, piled the refuse as high as 10 feet in spots to create hills of debris that will be whisked off to Iowa for shredding.

"Overwhelming," said Lake County Farm Bureau Manager Greg Koeppen. The bureau, along with the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, co-sponsored the first tire and oil collection event here in eight years.

He was confident the more than 60 tons collected then would be surpassed. Attendees included a 90-year-old man who finally gave up the tire that had been in his children's and grandchildren's sand box. Another man said he was bringing in the last piece of his '57 Chevy.

"There's a tire for every vehicle that moves in this pile somewhere," and a story to go with it, Koeppen added.

A lot of the tires were dumped on a road side or private property. Curtis Tutell, who owns about 11 acres of hidden property between McHenry and Crystal Lake, spent all morning loading a trailer with about five dozen tires, including two that stood about 4 feet tall.

"The land is out in the middle of nowhere. People just dump anything," he said. "This is a real blessing."

The toughest job fell to volunteers, like 19-year-old Jon West of Lakemoor, who hoisted the tires. He works on a farm near Antioch.

"It's about the same as a farm, just kind of throwing things around," he joked.

More than 2,500 gallons of used oil also was collected. It will be recycled and used in roadwork by asphalt companies.

The tires will be taken to a facility in Iowa to be shredded. They're then sold to coal-burning industries. About three-quarters of tires recycled in Illinois are used for fuel, with the rest reprocessed into other materials.

"It's called derived fuel," said Maggie Carson, spokeswoman for the IEPA. "In this case, you're doing it under controlled conditions, and you have emissions monitoring at the (smoke) stacks."